TThe first French phrases that Nigerian teenager Sara* learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were “Alors Meringue” And “that’s sweet“ to initiate sexual activity and then feign desire during the act.

The daughter of her mother’s best friend had told her that she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, she sent an older woman – a “madam” – who had paid for the travel expenses without her knowledge, to the city’s brothels every night.

Sara says she gets between 3,000 and 5,000 Central African francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for each man she sleeps with “for a short time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is split between the brothel, Sara and the brothel owner.

Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off her debt of 2.5 million CFA francs to the madam for travel, clothing, living expenses and bribes to agents and to be able to return to Nigeria.

“She (the lady) took away my Nigerian SIM card when I came here, so I couldn’t call my people back home for the first month,” says Sara, who now goes by Sugar and did not want to reveal her real age.

Human trafficking is a major problem in Nigeria: between 750,000 and one million people are forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labor exploitation.

Some of them are smuggled out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of Nigerian sex workers living in the cities of Ivory Coast, Nigerian officials tell the Guardian.

The girls and women are mostly trafficked by agents who take advantage of record unemployment in Nigeria and act under the pretext of offering better-paid work. Ten years ago, the Nigerian naira was worth three times as much as the CFA franc; today, one naira is equivalent to 0.38 CFA francs.

Due to its stable economy and legal prostitution (although soliciting sex is prohibited), Ivory Coast has become an attractive destination for sex work. Some victims later become brothel owners who refer other girls to recoup the money they spent and regain their own freedom.

Ivory Coast and neighbouring countries

Across Nigeria, recruiters go to rural communities or post in Facebook groups for job seekers, talking ambiguously about part-time jobs that bring rich rewards and sending photos of the girls and women they recruit to popular job boards.

They instruct recruits to tell immigration officials – who are sometimes aware of what is going on or simply not interested enough to conduct a proper check – that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, a relief port for Nigeria.

Many recruits report that agents known to be relatives do not accompany them on the journey but pass their numbers to other agents who escort them across the porous borders. Unable to identify themselves, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000 to 2,000 CFA, which the agents sometimes pay in advance to the driver.

Unlike Sara, most of the sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the Ivorian jungle, far from the law.

In Tengréla, 7 km from the Malian border, there are several artisanal miners’ camps where men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea earn money before returning to their home countries. Nigerian sex workers aged 14 to 38 also live here in small settlements made of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.

In the “maquis” – as the small bars in Francophone Africa are called – which belong to the madams in the settlements, immigrants from both groups interact with each other, first publicly and then privately.

“In some gold mining regions, there is a strange belief that sex helps find gold, which in turn fuels the demand for sex trafficking,” says a former Nigerian official who was previously stationed in Ivory Coast. “The cocoa (producing) communities also have high sexual demands to satisfy the men.”

The Guardian spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the forest, some as young as 15. Some of them said they had been starved for refusing to work, or beaten by angry customers. Many speak little French and say they do not know the country well enough to flee.

Nigerian officials who have succeeded in bringing girls trapped as sex workers back to their home country report seeing girls as young as 13 in the interior of the country.

“Many of the girls we found claim to be over 18 and to be doing sex work voluntarily, but most of the time you can tell from their appearance that they are not,” says the former Nigerian official. “Age determination tests, such as scanning a wisdom tooth, cost about 50,000 CFA, so you have to talk to them, but if they insist, you can make them come back.”

Ivory Coast has a law criminalizing human trafficking, but it is rarely enforced and the country has been criticized by the U.S. State Department for its failure to combat the problem.

The Escadron, a notorious Ivorian police unit, has burned down some of the settlements where traffickers operate, but new ones keep springing up, partly because security forces who come into the jungle reportedly demand weekly bribes of 1,000 to 2,000 CFA francs per trafficked girl.

Adekoye Vincent, spokesman for Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Human Trafficking (Naptip), declined to comment on the girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast. The Ivorian National Police and Gendarmerie did not respond to requests for comment.

For Sara, the wait to return home continues. She attended middle school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, before dropping out to travel to Ivory Coast. She is currently learning how to trade condoms for other items.

“I really don’t like the work I do here. I miss my people at home,” she says.

* Names have been changed